AV festival – review

This year marks the 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth, the 20th anniversary of his death, and 11 years since the commencement of the longest concert in history – a performance of Cage's ASLSP (As Slow As Possible), played on the organ of an abandoned church in Halberstadt, which is scheduled to continue for a further 628 years.

The opening weekend of the fifth AV festival, subtitled As Slow As Possible, paid tribute to Cage with a series of works of punishing duration. Film-maker and composer Phill Niblock is known for extremely loud, extremely long drone concerts presented in his New York loft, where listeners are free to move around experiencing the throb of slowly shifting frequencies. Yet the impulse to wander at the Sage was curtailed by the rows of chairs, which slightly diminished the impact of a three-note electric guitar duet performed by Susan Stenger and Robert Poss against an inscrutable film backdrop of manual workers fishing, threshing and harvesting.

Yoshi Wada is a Japanese jazz saxophonist who went to New York in the 1960s to work as a plumber, fell under the influence of the Fluxus movement, and developed a passion for bagpipes. His Lament for John Cage pitted the distorted guitars of Stenger and Poss against three kilted members of the City of Newcastle Pipeband in a curious work that sounded at times like a confrontation between a highland marching regiment and the Velvet Underground.

Cage's ponderous meditation on a Zen garden, Ryoanji, and the meandering harp improvisation Postcard from Heaven were given reverential treatment. Yet the composer's subversive humour only really emerged in a recitation by poet Kenneth Goldsmith of Cage's famous lecture on nothing: "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry."